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David Pogue has distilled into useful form a long-standing complaint I have (and one reason I have long had a voice mail greeting that asked people not to leave me voicemail): cell phone companies set up the greeting, caller instructions, and playback system prompts in large part to maximize their revenue per user; by his calculations, the "mandatory 15-second voicmail instructions" from AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile and others is earning those companies something near a billion dollars a year in charges. Pogue suggests that users should "take back the beep," and to that end provides contact information for the largest cell carriers in order to register a complaint — and, more helpful in the short run, suggests ways in which to make better use of paid-for phone minutes by alerting callers how to bypass the annoying instructions.

What would save us consumers a lot more money is having cellphone operators bill usage by the second. The European Commission alreadyforced the European operators [cnn.com] to adopt 1-second billing increments.

Damn it, every single good technology regulation idea I've seen in the past ten years, from universal cell phone chargers to browser choice in operating systems, has come from the EU. Why can't we stand up to big corporations here in the US?

Welcome to the U$: government by the corporations, for the corporations.

Track how much slush fund money Obama got under the table from certain groups if you don't believe me. Keep track of why certain Florida/California representatives might as well tag their names with (D-Disney) rather than (D-State).

Look at who paid for - and got - the last three copyright extensions, the DMCA, etc.

This is what happens when your campaigns are privately financed and not on level playing fields (e.g. same budgetary restrictions per candidate).

Hey, look. Another dorm room political expert who puts dollar signs in proper names, because corruption only occurs in the U.S.! What was all that stuff about the U.N.'s oil for food program? I only criticize the U$!

We don't need to regulate it. Just do what I do and say at the end of my voicemail, "press * to leave a message". This varies from carrier to carrier so you'll need to find out what yours is. Sprint is 1 IIRC, others might be #, etc.

On at&t, and T-Mobile pressing the # key skips the greeting, on Verizon Wireless and Sprint you press the * key. It is usually the key opposite of the key you press to get the login prompts. For example you press * on at&t to get the login prompts, and # to skip the greeting.

hmm.. let's take Carlin's speech point by point, by slightly paraphrasing what he says:

"politicians are puppets controlled by corporations and rich lobbies" . I'd say that is true for the most part, even if it doesn't happen in a direct way. Corporations can threaten to cut jobs, close down factories or offices, relocate in another state or country or even just disproportionally increase the price of their product if the CEOs think that new legislations might decrease the profit for their shareholders. That would result in, at least, jobs being lost in the area and might (and probably would) prove a big enough incentive to stop certain laws or regulations to be passed. Everybody is just doing their job : politicians have to evaluate whether the law or regulation is worth the corporation's reaction, and corporation's need to maximise the profit for the shareholders. (I'll pass the cases where hands have to be greased or forced, or when a politician only thinks of his career)"

"Corporations, etc... don't want the common folks to be capable of critical thinking", Although it would make sense (read "1984"), there is no direct evidence of it... only circumstantial : the rise of Fox Network for example, or the way newspapers will rather tell you that Lindsay Lohan broke her toe nail, or that the giants won the superball rather than that, again, X american soldiers were killed in Iraq or Afghanistan one day earlier. Incidentally repeatedly pounding on how great your nation is and making kids repeat that over and over is a great way to hammer obedience in the mind of the people you want to govern

"Society has a class system, and most people are not in the ruling/rich class". well... that there is a widening gap between rich and poor [nytimes.com] (yes, I know... 2 years old. But I don't believe this has changed much. Prove me wrong). So... nothing to see. He is right. And before you reply "The poor deserved it. Everybody can be rich", check this very nice and interesting TED talk about (along other things) Meritocracies [ted.com]

"Politicians don't care about the people who elect them". I'm not completely as nihilistic as Carlin. I honestly think many politicians start their career because they actually genuinely care. Sadly, as should be obvious to anybody who switched from his productive job to Management and was full of hope to be able to make a change, the higher you are the thinner the air is and the more you just struggle to survive. Even if some politicians do still care about the people after they've been elected to a position of power, helping people is probably more of an afterthought while juggling with more important issues (what those can be is probably not even something the politicians can decide themselves)

so... 'the paranoid ramblings of a deluded old man shouting at hippies' ? perhaps, but at least he actually knows what he is talking about.

It's a double edged sword. Yes, there are some great EU market regulations (like standardized cellphone chargers), but there are some pretty terrible regulations, too. Many of the EU market regulations are extremely expensive to comply with. You would not be happy, I assure you, if prices at Fry's and Microcenter were as high as prices are at retail stores in France.

Ha! My ex is a lawyer in France, and I can assure you she works far far more than 35 hours per week. The standard work week is a fantasy. The French, in almost every case make significantly less money than their American counterparts.

They have a better social safety net. True. But overall, they are significantly poorer.

Hm perhaps you should do a little research. Start with this [wikipedia.org]. Notice the line "The 35 hours was the legal standard limit" in the summary!

And yes, I see those taxes as a bad thing. That is because I crave freedom, and despise any collectivist attempt to take the wealth that I produce away from me at gunpoint. Just as I despise any attempt from any other thief taking my wealth from me at gunpoint.

I'll bite. Medical Device regulations, for one. To sell in Europe you need to be ISO-certified, which means you have to buy the standard (in this case, ISO 13485), for a couple thousand - then you have to contract with a certifying organization, which you will pay several thousand dollars to have someone come and audit your paperwork for a few days before making some findings and leaving (they don't want to revoke your certification, though - if they do that, you'll get a different certifying body next time, and they won't get your money. You are the customer of the person auditing you - there's a pretty clear conflict of interest).

ISO 13485 mandates that you "establish, document, implement, and maintain a quality management system and maintain its effectiveness." Basically, they mandate... paperwork.

By contrast, in the US, you need to abide by FDA's cGMP part 820, which is freely available on their website and which they will periodically audit you on and put you out of business if you're not compliant.

The FDA, meanwhile, says "[t]he requirements in this part govern the methods used in, and the facilities and controls used for, the design, manufacture, packaging, labeling, storage, installation, and servicing of all finished devices intended for human use. The requirements in this part are intended to ensure that finished devices will be safe and effective and otherwise in compliance with the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (the act)." They mandate good manufacturing practices that insure you don't kill people with your product, and on the offchance that you DO, that you keep records that would enable you to do an immediate recall while notifying the FDA.

ISO mandates process diagrams and a quality policy. Useful.

In fact, the whole reason that ISO 13485 came about is because the FDA determined that ISO 9001 was stupid and dangerous, and that any medical device manufacturer who became 9001 certified would not get cleared for sale in the US.

"In fact, the whole reason that ISO 13485 came about is because the FDA determined that ISO 9001 was stupid and dangerous" hm. No. The doc just says they don't see it as necessary to force firm to change to a standardized process. And neither do the EU rely on ISO 13485 for safety too. It is jsut for traceability to have a standardized way of getting documentation and process audit done. The satuff still has to go through a safety test anyway.

Purchasing power parity? Are you kidding me? That's just per-capita GDP with a paint job. Here are RFK's immortal words on that subject:

Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product - if we judge the United States of America by that - that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.

Well, if your voicemail was intended to be 1:55, and you have to wait an extra 15 seconds, you will be charged 3 minutes instead of 2. That does not amount to much for most people, but it does add up, and cell carriers do make a decent amount of money by forcing everyone to use extra minutes like that. I have to wonder why no price fixing investigations have ever been taken up in response to that sort of behavior.

Regardless of cost it's still incredibly obnoxious having to listen to that crap. Particularly when someone either already has a long message or has gone out of his way to make a short one. Does anyone ever even use those garbage options? Page them? wtf? is this the 90's? If I'd wanted to do that I would have sent him a text.

My second favorite are the menus that start with "Please listen carefully as our options have changed blah blah blah..." It seems, almost invariably, that those messages just become permanent. Someone changes the system and forgets they added that message or never bothers to update it.

If their phone is off/out of range, you won't show up in the missed calls log because the phone never got the call.

Of course, at least with Sprint, it tells you who called (by name if they are a Sprint customer, by number otherwise) when you retrieve the message, no need to even have your cell phone record the caller ID in your call log. Of course, if your friend isn't a Sprint customer and you don't have their phone number committed to memory, this could be less than convenient, but one would hope that you might possibly recognize their voice.

My second favorite are the menus that start with "Please listen carefully as our options have changed blah blah blah..." It seems, almost invariably, that those messages just become permanent. Someone changes the system and forgets they added that message or never bothers to update it.

Hey, I programmed that system. That message is prepended to the menu anytime the menu changes. Exactly one week after the message has changed the system automatically changes the menu to remove the prepended message. There's no way that message constantly appears.

Since there is no way to backspace, if you screw up a digit (which is all too easy to do on many phones) you can just hit the pound sign early and re-enter it. If you instead just hit more random numbers until you hit 5 digits, then there is a risk that the number you entered might be valid and it will let you incorrectly proceed.

It may not cost you anything, but not everyone has the luxury of being on an unlimited or high limit plan. In fact, there's a good number of people that don't have a traditional cell phone contract and use the rechargeable/calling card/by the minute/pay as you go type phones.

Personally, I have an older contract that doesn't have a ton of minutes each month. I don't regularly use more than half of my minutes each month, but then again I hardly talk on the phone. I know a good sized chunk of people who hav

It's called the # key. It works on T-Mobile and with many other vendor's voicemail systems. It was not a grand conspiracy to rack up minutes when answering machines allowed you to customize your greeting (even though long distance charges were 28 cents a minutes back in that day). It's not a conspiracy now.

He mentions the # in the article. That's not the point. The point is that millions upon millions of customers are not as smart as you are, so they listen through that voicemail message every single time they want to leave a message. That adds up to hundreds of thousands or millions of wasted man-hours each year, as well as additional charges to some customers.

And if you had read TFA, you'd have noticed that he mentioned the fact that he's talked to high-up execs at these companies and that they admitted to him that they do it for the purpose of collecting additional charges. So, while "conspiracy" may be a rather strong word, it's not altogether inaccurate.

The markup on this is insane, and the main reason why I use it as seldom as possible. I send barely a dozen text messages a year and will keep it that way until the prices come down to earth. And don't try to sell me on an "unlimited text" plan because I have never in my life sent $5 worth of text messages in a month.

MMS

I honestly haven't found a good reason to care about this one yet, one way or the other. Voicemail is adequately cheap and effective for me.

It's called the # key. It works on T-Mobile and with many other vendor's voicemail systems

On Sprint you press 1.
On Verizon there is no key. You can mash keys until you run out of buttons and the closest you'll get is a prompt asking for the customer's PIN.
I don't know anyone currently on AT&T so I don't know what the option is for their voicemail (if there is one).

It's not a conspiracy now.

Its not a universal standard, either. Maybe we don't need to go all the way to beep-only, but it would be nice if there was a consistent way to bypass other people's voicemail greetings, especially if you don't know beforehan

T-Mobile doesn't charge me to call my own voicemail, so that doesn't matter. As far as leaving a message for others, does anyone really leave longer than a 45-second message anyway (keeping the total under a minute)? Name, number, quick reason you're calling, that's all you need usually.

If someone made a 120 calls that were each 30 seconds long, I seriously doubt that their bill for the month would show 0 minutes. More likely, it would show 60 minutes of calls. Just because a specific call is under 60 seconds does not mean that the cell phone companies are ignoring it. They all get rolled together in the end.

No, it will show 120 minutes of usage. US carriers bill in 1-minute increments. The point is that while 120 calls of 0:59 duration bill as 120 minutes of usage, 120 calls of 1:01 duration (that's four minutes' more total airtime) will bill as 240 minutes of usage.

Maybe my perception is wrong, but aren't the majority of U.S. cell phone users on a plan that they're paying for in terms of 100s of minutes at least? 15 seconds is annoying, and I agree with his preference for these things going away, but who doesn't just have a monthly plan that dwarfs their actual usage to start with? Pogue's back-of-the-envelope calculations seems to completely ignore this.

But there is no doubt it is a huge earner for the networks. Here in Ireland, and even on Skype now you often have to pay something like 5c as soon as the phone is answered, this includes getting someones voicemail. I never leave a message, I have listened to my own messages being played back at someone elses house and just didn't like it. I prefer to call back or send a SMS.

The worst has to be getting someone's voicemail when calling from a satellite phone, 75c down the drain for nothing. Really wish there was a 5 second chance for you to hang up and not get charged, or better still abolish voicemail altogether. Let people run their own answering machines if they desire but ban voicemail

Really wish there was a 5 second chance for you to hang up and not get charged, or better still abolish voicemail altogether. Let people run their own answering machines if they desire but ban voicemail

That works fine for landlines, but for people who only have cell phones, they can't run an answering machine.

Get a real phone plan, or one from a decent provider. AT&T just capped my rollover minutes when I hit something like 4000 (in just 2 years on the minimal 700 minute a month plan). Does anyone really have a plan where they regularly go over their monthly allotment, and it's not cheaper to get the next tier?

If the 15 seconds is too painful, read up on the options to skip the message. As for the man up comment - that goes for you, too, Timothy. And while we're at it, why don't you go ahead and turn in your geek card for not knowing you could hit # and skip right to the beep.

Go to the next tier? yeah, thats playing right into the hands of AT&T. I'm billed by the second and i still get pissed off that I have to pay to listen to some recording that hasn't changed in 4 years.

You seem to be supporting the Big American Telco's mantra that prepaid = for poor people and kids who can't control their spending. I was in the good ole US of A a while ago and it seemed like the T-mobile staffers job was to laugh at me first when I told them I had a pre-paid sim, tried to sign me up t

Yes, # skips the greeting when calling AT&T subscribers and, apparently, T-Mobile subscribers. If you call a Verizon customer and press #, you get the login prompt, and (AFAICT) no way to actually leave your friend a message without calling back.

So, just as TFA says: You can skip everyone's greeting, but you have to memorize which carrier they use.

Although I would question the validity of a billion dollar scam (as another user points out most plans get free minutes and if you exceed your quota by 15 seconds or 1 minutes, wow...) Perhaps it is a cross billing issue between providers?

I HATE that stupid message. It will be the second reason I can't wait to dump Verizon Wireless this fall when my contract expires. Yes I have the "You may press * to bypass this message" at the start of my greeting (yes, it is * for Verizon) but nobody else does this so

If you are calling a sprint customer, you can bypass their voicemail greeting by pressing 1, and get the beep you really want.

On the opposite end of the spectrum is Verizon, who as best I can tell does not allow you to bypass the greeting and prompt. Indeed if you don't like it when people leave you voicemail, become a Verizon subscriber and use a super-long greeting. People will give up on leaving a voicemail on your phone.

All cell phone companies allow the caller to skip straight to the beep.
It is usually # or *.
Figure yours out.
Make your message something to the effect of:
"Hi, this is fred. I can't take your call now. Leave me a message. In the future, to skip straight to the beep, press X"
Most cell phone companies have a "fast prompt" setting for retrieving your messages. It isn't fast enough for a geek who is used to memorizing interactive prompts, but it is at least 50% faster than normal prompts. Turn yours on.

I understand the concern of unnecessary use of a few seconds per phone call 5 or 10 years ago, but lately with the advent of VOIP I'd contend this concern has slowly been fading out.

Flashback to 1995 when cellphone bills and long distance calls were by the minute and rather expensive. Only landline local calls were exempt from by-minute charges, and phone companies had a lot of opportunities to increase revenue by lengthening phone calls just a little bit.

Compare that to today when most cellphone users have free night and weekend minutes plus anytime minutes, most landlines have free long distance and some users with unlimited cell plans are immune from these charges. The only people affected are those making international calls or using cellphones during the day while over their minutes. This is an increasingly small demographic.

Compound that with the fact that data is where most of the cellphone money is and you quickly see that keeping people connected via cell tower may prevent more business / data users from connecting who really have the high paying plans. It's actually in cellphone companies' best interest now to keep those lines as clear as possible to support good service to as many new / existing customers as possible instead of keeping the airwaves as busy as possible.

If you have one of the plans which makes you fit into the demographic affected by a 15 second delay, then I can understand your desire to shorten the time to when you can leave a message or leave none at all, but I personally am a fan of voice mail intros as it lets me know I didn't accidentally dial a wrong number. My advice for you is to learn the quick-keys on various carriers that bring you to the voice mailbox immediately (like # on T-mobile and Sprint.) I wouldn't disagree to going to a per-second billing like the EU did, but I promise you can take off your tinfoil hats - there is no conspiracy to make you use more minutes anymore and removing voice mailbox introductions would actually be removing something valuable for some people.

I don't know what regulator would do it (DOJ Anti-Trust or Commerce), but if the cell phone market is supposed to be competitive, regulators should jump all over the cell carriers when they all engage in the same practice billed at the same rate.

The carriers should be required to provide documentation supporting their pricing and if they all have a similar high margin for a given service (eg, over 20% or something) the regulator should find them "non-competitive" and order them all to cut their price to wha

Huh? That's incoherent. If four companies each charge the same for a message and they have identical margins, then their cost is the same. A lower uniforn margin applied to the same cost will result in a uniform price. Also, if you were to try that, companies would just doctor their margin figures to support a higher price.

The Sherman Antitrust Act [wikipedia.org] already has a remedy for price fixing: the act made it a felony. All we need to do is enforce this 1898 piece of legislation.

I hadn't even realized it until I was bored one time when I was checking my voicemail. I went through the other options to see what was available and one of them was to turn off these pre-recorded caller instructions that he's complaining about.

Maybe people just need to check what options their voicemail provides them instead of jumping to drastic measures like this? Wait... I forgot who I'm talking to here...

An interesting, relatively unknown fact that I picked up while working on telephony systems a while back: carriers get paid (by other carriers) for incoming calls.

Not only do you pay more to your carrier to listen to the inane voicemail prompt (since you might use more minutes), but your carrier also pays more to your friend's carrier. For example, if I'm an AT&T customer and I call a Verizon customer to leave a voicemail, AT&T has to pay Verizon for every second that I'm on the phone. This (perverse) incentive makes more sense than charging people for more minutes, since often the company charging for minutes (AT&T in this case) is not the company that controls the recorded message (Verizon).

We're at the point in society where people should know how to leave a message on a damn answering machine. Hell, we stopped having the 'http://' on URLs in ads and business cards five years ago, but somehow people have forgotten how to operate an answering machine/voice mail after them being common for 25 years!

Also, we don't need to be informed someone can't answer the phone, but to leave a message and he'll get back to you. First of all, the voice mail message does not magically know that that is true...maybe he can answer it, and just didn't. Maybe he's dead, and won't return your call ever. Maybe he just doesn't fucking like you. Stop telling me nonsensical shit you don't actually know, you machine. Just record the damn message.

When an answering machines picks up, I should hear, in most cases, be something like "This is John Smith's phone. *beeeep*".

And the only reason there should be any message at all is to confirm we have the right phone number.

I'm on Bell Mobility in Canada (until July 2009 when I can change without penalty) and not only do we have the listed voice mail annoyances, we also pay $6 each a month for caller id and voicemail. Also there is no trick that a caller can use to skip the greeting. If you record your own, it appends "At the tone, leave your message" anyways.

Did I mention we have to pay about $20 more a month on average (even after currency conversion)?